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miércoles, 19 de noviembre de 2014

Introduction

The content of this post is a survey report of a Smalltalk questionnaire. The purpose of this report is to determine the opinion of developers about Smalltalk related topics. A limit of 10 questions was imposed to the survey because of the SurveyMonkey Free Account limitations.

The survey was anonymous and contained partially structured questions with open-ended questions where participants could add thoughts or missing options. The survey was conducted from 11/10/2014 to 30/10/2014. Only the first week of the survey non-smalltalk forums were privileged. The information below summarize statistics:

Survey Statistics

(Click the following figures to open the whole image)

Question 1 highlights

Smalltalk was not listed as an option in the valid responses.

This question was mostly directed to non-smalltalkers.

Question 2 highlights

Goal of the question was to determine a general attitude towards the technology.

There is a good reception of Smalltalk, although respondents where scarce (22).

This question was mostly directed to non-smalltalkers.

Question 3 highlights

The idea was the same as Question 2, but focused towards a professional level of choice.

This question was directed to both smalltalkers and non-smalltalkers.

Question 4 highlights

The question tried to determine the Smalltalk platforms most used.

This question was mainly directed to smalltalkers.

Unsurprisingly, Pharo, VisualAge and VisualWorks seem to be the most deployable environments.

More recent or commercial projects like S8, Smalltalk MT or LSW are almost unknown.

The respondents also noted Amber as ocasionally used or prototyped/deployed a product.

Question 5 highlights

This question is similar to Question 4, but focused on the current use.

Products like VisualSmalltalk and Smalltalk/X, both considered (technically) excellent Smalltalk flavors, keep almost unused.

Question 6 highlights

This question addressed four technology aspects: Usability, Speed, Community Health and Overall.

There is a notable unsatisfaction at the Community level for most Smalltalk communities.

The old fallacy of Smalltalk being slow seems to be almost refuted by a general satisfaction in execution speed.

Maybe unexpectedly, the usability award was for VisualSmalltalk.

Question 7 highlights

All respondents answered this question.

Besides the expected noise towards libraries for common application scenarios, there is a considerable interest in Data Science (Visualization, Mining, etc).